And Don't Get Me Started on Prius Owners

Why Calling Electric Cars 'Zero Emission' Is Blatantly False Advertising

Relax, Let Law Enforcement Be the Only Ones to Have Guns

After Night of Drinking, F.B.I. Supervisor Wakes to Find a Woman Stole His Gun

Thanks, Government

CDC: Too early to tell if flu shot will be more effective than last year

I'm beginning to think flu shots are some weird government/big pharma/med insurance scam to enable their graft.

Those People Have Suffered Enough. Have You No Decency?

Lin-Manuel Miranda to Star in 'Hamilton' in Puerto Rico

For Those Curious, It Was One of the Only Places in Rome Where One Could Buy Camels

No more holy smokes: Pope nixes cigarette sales at Vatican

A Christian, by devotion, prefers liberty to equality.

True. It's One of the Reasons We Have Religion.

Not Every Tragedy Has a Political Solution

Oh, I Think I Know Why

Why Restaurants Increasingly Are Banning Children

Children are raised to behave abysmally.  Their parents seem dazed at the notion of parental accountability.  I recall being taught how to act in public, especially at a meal, and how postive it was to be complimented on my manners.  I felt as if I belonged in the company of adults.  It may me feel at ease and welcomed.

The other day I saw some upper-middle class urchin sitting on a floor by the kitchen doors at a restaurant playing some game on her lobotomy pad while workers were forced to step over and around her while they were carrying trays with food.  Her sibling was running around in the bar section while the parents, with forced rictus smiles, observed them as if they were remote quarks dancing about in a radio-microscope lens.

This is why I often seek out the darkest of dive bars in order to get away from the more base aspects of humanity: Namely, parents with children.  Dive bars are dark, the patrons are sketchy, the food will probably poison you, but they scare away young parents and their children.  Also, I get along with bikers.

Post #8000

That's all, really.  I just wanted to round up the number of posts on The Coracle from 7999.

Basically, This Explains All of Social Media

"Galway Girl", as Sung by the Residents of Galway

Another Day with Every Clergyperson a Sudden Expert in Firearms and Constitutional Law

For those calling for more gun control, I would observe that, since all laws are dependent on every citizen's willingness to cooperate and fulfill the law's obligation, there will always be limits to what laws may accomplish. 

In the case in point, if the United States Air Force had done what they are supposed to do with the information they had on the latest atheist miscreant to vent his psychotic rage on a collection of Christians, given that he had spent a year in the brig for violence to women and children, not to mention a demonstrated fondness for unsavory computer materials, he would not have been permitted to purchase a firearm under existing gun control laws.

By all means, create more control laws, just don't fool yourselves into thinking that a greater complication of laws means greater compliance or the absence of bureaucratic folly.

If someone in public office, say a senator from my state, dusts off a pre-written statement on gun violence seemingly within minutes of an act of violence, I suspect merely to use wanton slaughter to raise his political profile, I would direct you to something I wrote earlier about the steps to take to repeal the Second Amendment.  Whoever initiates this action will never be president, but it will make those pre-written statements seem less hollow.

Also, clergy colleagues, when has a scolding, know-it-all tone ever convinced anyone in this century that your political perspective is inviolate?

After the Remarkable Anti-Christian Comments Made Since Sunday, this Satire is Apt

‘Praying Doesn’t Help Anything,’ Says Man Whose Idea Of Helping Is Trolling

“All your guys’ thoughts and prayers don’t do anything,” he wrote in a lengthy rant online. “Unlike you religious plebs, I’m committed to help out my fellow man by calling people names on social media.”

Shenandoah

I suppose I had one of those moments that has been described to me through the years by mature acquaintances; moments of sudden and heavy nostalgia for times gone by and people I've known.

Since my wife and I sleep and wake at different times, we have gotten used to our individual patterns.  She doesn't wake when I stub my toe and mutter an exclamation in the darkness of our bedroom at 4am, I'm able to sleep through the radio to which she listens until after midnight.

Sometime last night, some version of this song must have been played.  My mother, who was born in Scotland and always found this tune, its history, and its protean lyrics to be quintessentially American, used to play it on our piano and sing in that musical Glaswegian accent.  The ancient American side of my family liked it, too.  When I woke this morning, after stubbing my toe, I had a wave of longing for days gone by.

I grew up far away from the genteel New England towns in which I've lived and worked for the last thirty years.  If not so far away in geography, certainly in terms of culture.  Comparatively, the southern Ohio of the late 1950's may as well have been the frontier.  Given that I was raised by, in part, actual Indians makes these memories all the more obtuse given the circumstances of my adulthood.

Anyway, I woke today missing my grandparents, the two from my very old, American family that predates the Revolution and mass migration of Europeans, and the two who arrived in the United States in the 1920's.  I miss my late parents, and the mentors I've had, all but one of whom has died in the past few years.  So many, many with whom I can only speak now through memory.

I miss the wild woods and trails of The Big Flat; those clean, fish-filled streams; the calls of fowl and other fauna.  I miss having nothing expected of me other than to respect my parents, have good table manners, never to swear in public, and pray in church once a week.

But, as I can now see Old Mortality off on the horizon, still far away but close enough to give me a hearty wave from time to time, I miss listening to all of those people laughing and talking.  All those accents, from hillbilly to Tayside; all those stories, from places far away and from places just across the field; all that love.

Oh, well.  I have to get back to work, now.  There are stewardship letters to write and church records to update; there are people who want me to visit them without having to tell me they want me to visit them.  There are all of mundane realities of life away from those woods and those people.

I will be humming this all day, though.

Archaeological News

Of all the estates and houses available to King Henry VIII, Greenwich Palace in southeast London was known to be his favorite. The king spent more than 4,000 nights there (that’s almost 11 years in total), and he added a number of structures to it, including an armory staffed by metalsmiths from abroad. The palace was largely razed by the end of the seventeenth century, and little sign of it remains aboveground. Recently, however, two of its rooms were unearthed during construction of a visitor center at the Old Royal Naval College, which sits on the palace’s former grounds. “We knew it was quite likely we might find the odd bit of historical Greenwich,” says William Palin, director of conservation at the Old Royal Naval College, “but nothing quite prepared us for the discoveries that were made.” One of the rooms had lead-glazed tiles, and researchers believe it may have been a part of Henry VIII’s armory. The other featured a number of niches thought to have been used as “bee boles,” where hive baskets were kept warm during the winter months.

Boomer Childhood Could Be a Little Weird

Meanwhile, in the U.S. Virgin Islands

REMOVAL OF DISPLACED VESSELS IN SALT RIVER AND LONG REEF BEGINS; MORE THAN 400 IDENTIFIED TERRITORY-WIDE

The Obsession Also Makes Most Clergy Gatherings Tedious

Here in the northeast, where voters rejected Trump by overwhelming majorities, there is an obsession with Trump that borders on the unhealthy. He dominates thought and conversation like no other president before him. He is every northeast liberal’s nightmare.

The Government is Messing with Time, Again

The Voices on the Radio: Freed, Franklin, and Dee

I love radio - its immediacy and especially its intimacy... 

it is part of your life, whispering into your ear. - Malcolm Turnbull

_________________________________________________________________________

Mine is the TV generation, or so I'm told.  The truth is more complicated, as is often the case with truth.

Perhaps it was because I achieved my teenage years around the same time that FM was developed, or because cable TV sports had not reached its current ubiquity and, thus, a more traditional medium for listening to baseball and basketball was still required, but I recall most of my best memories of growing up involved listening to the radio.  Whether it was the stately tube radio on which my grandfather and I listened to Cleveland Indians games, or the clock radio on my nightstand in our house on East 213th St. from which I cheered the Cleveland Cavaliers onto rare victories during their expansion year, or the rather nice Pioneer receiver in my college dorm, purchased with money made from a summer job, on which I heard the alternative rock music of my generation from stations like the late, lamented WNCR and the now-lamentable WMMS, it was voices on the radio rather than images on a TV screen that brought me a world that was vivid and immediate.

There was a great tradition of radio in Cleveland, especially in regards to the music that would first be labeled "rock and roll" by a metro disk jockey named Alan Freed.  In the early 1950's, Freed realized, despite what the commercial interests who underwrote the expenses of his radio station thought, that a new sound was being heard in the small clubs and road houses.  As his friend was Leo Mintz, the owner of Record Rendezvous, the most popular record store in northeastern Ohio [and even where, from 1968 until 1982, I bought every album of popular music I owned], Freed knew that young people, flush with 1950's affluence, were buying rhythm and blues songs marked by a torrid beat and incomprehensible lyrics.  As these songs were mostly performed by black artists, they were relegated to the "ethnic" stations on the low end of the dial and given their own separate listing on the Billboard charts.  Freed felt it was time they were mainstreamed.



This was met with the usual resistance, of course, as smart choices are usually the ones that require some courage, and courage is a rare word in corporations.  However, using the leverage that was enabled by Record Rendezous' support of Freed's radio show, and the guarantee of about 250,000 rabid potential listeners, he branded himself the "King of the Moondoggers" and played, late night after late night, this new form of music on "The Moondog Show".

Any sentient human being knows the rest of the story.  Rock and Roll became the standard of popular music, shoving big band, jazz, choral, and even true rhythm and blues into their own musical sidestream, and becoming the soundtrack for the remainder of The American Century.  Freed would move to New York City in the early sixties and, thus, spread the sound that originated on the shores of Lake Erie.

Although he would die a couple of years before the Summer of Love [which, in Cleveland, was the year after the Summer of Violence], and thus before I began earnestly to listen to the radio, Freed's style and passion would continue to be copied and presented through all of the popular radio markets in the United States.  As testimony to his influence, when it was time to choose a city in which to locate the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, there really were no other serious candidates.

It wasn't just in music, however, that new ideas were being presented through Cleveland radio.  In the early 1970's, a mundane local sportscaster was given his own radio show and ordered to "make it interesting".  If any of the readers are old enough to remember sports radio in the 1960's, that might seem to have been an impossible assignment.  However, Pete Franklin, armed with this commission from his bosses, began to seek on-air phone calls from particularly opinionated and abrasive listeners [no shortage of those in Northeastern Ohio], issue forth with pungent observations on the mediocrity that is, by tradition, Cleveland professional sports, openly and loudly question the intelligence and sanity of team owners, and quickly become the only sports radio show to which anyone would listen.

My favorite moment was when he would introduce the nightly report on the Cleveland Indians by playing a funeral dirge. 

Like Freed and many others who pushed the envelop of "acceptable" behavior [what a quaint notion, especially in regards to radio], Franklin would be hired and fired in a funicular of employment.  Still, his radio persona was so successful that he has been copied again and again, even into the television market through ESPN and similar cable channels so that, if you have never heard of Franklin, you've "heard" him through the heirs of his style.  Also like Freed, Franklin would take his act to New York, for better or worse.

It's difficult to characterize Gary D. Gilbert, whose radio name was Gary Dee.  When I was in high school, my father, whose office was next door, would drive me to school.  It wasn't a very long drive, but I would listen to Gary Dee on the car radio on the way, much to my father's lament, as he found Dee common, unnecessarily hostile, and too loud.  This is what made Dee perfect for older teenagers, though, as the conversation in homeroom would always be about whom Dee had verbally abused on the radio that morning and to what extent.

Contemporary "shock jocks" are ubiquitous these days, but Dee was the originator of that manner of attracting listeners.  Although he was working on what was supposedly a country music station, he would maybe play, during the course of a four hour show in morning drive time, one song by George Jones or...well, Jones is the only one I remember.  The rest of the 240 minutes not claimed by some surprisingly high-end advertisers would be spent encouraging phone calls from the rich crop of eccentrics who lived in the greater metro area.  Dee referred to them as "egg-suckin' dogs".

He was cruel to fools, abrasive to political figures, intolerant of authority, and generally representative of every exaggerated quality of the classic American crank.  Having said that, he would also frequently host the president of Cleveland's city council, a formidable figure widely recognized as the true boss of the city, and engage in such playfully hostile banter with him that both would be de-articulated with laughter.

There's something to be said about being able to attract the largest radio audience in the Midwestern United States to listen to two grown men laugh like children into a couple of microphones.  Well, in radio, it's whatever works.

Dee lived a life similar to the most dissolute of the country artists whose music he was supposed to play on his show.  He battled the demon of addiction, would sometimes be in trouble with the police, would make the daily papers with a scandalous divorce, and would also watch his Arbitron ratings soar with every occasion of negative attention.

One Saturday night, my best friend and I, coming back from a baseball game or concert or something, decided, as we knew we were driving through the "mansion section" of the city, to cruise by Dee's home along the lake shore.  As we approached his house we saw police lights, several cars parked hither and yon, and a lot of people milling about the front yard.  Thinking we were about to approach a crime scene, my friend and I were preparing for a marvelous story to be told in homeroom.

As we got closer to the house, we saw a mad party in progress with Dee standing in his front yard with his left hand around the neck of a whiskey bottle, his right arm around a zaftig, bleached blonde who really didn't look like she was from Cleveland, posing for photographs with about half of the Cleveland Police Department.  Everyone present looked like they were completely, in Dee's words, "wrapped around the axle".

My friend, who was prepping to enter pre-med at Case Western Reserve University [and is now a senior surgeon with the University Hospital system in Cleveland] said, "Maybe I should study broadcasting."

I could speak at length about Dee's influence in this particular corner of the medium, but I will simply note that the fellow who hosted the afternoon drive time show on the same station copied Dee's style.  His name was Don Imus.  Whatever happened to him, I wonder?

All of these memories were brought to mind the other day when one of my students told me that she was working on a study of the influence of radio on culture.  Since broadcast, commercial radio has mostly surrendered to satellite stations and MP3 players, it amazed her that once upon a time there was a free, open forum for the expression of opinion and art that pre-dated the Internet and social media.  "It wasn't as backwards as I thought," she noted.

No, and in many ways, it was even broader and more accepting of new ideas than is the tightly constrained and politically sensitive Internet.  While TV brought us images of the world, radio brought us a far greater range of ideas and expression in a rapid and nimble format.

Or, as a program director for whom I worked in my radio days once said, "It's amazing how much you can see with your ears."